Blood, Sweat, Tears
by Auditory Eden
Summary: When the thirst is too much, when they can't take it any more.... Yuuki/Zero, T for Graphic imagery, but not sexual.


Author: Auditory Eden

Rating: High T

Warnings: Graphic imagery

Notes: So much emo rock went into the production of this fic. I don't think I've ever mainlined so much Linkin Park, Evanescence, Rise Against, The Eagles, Three Days Grace, Flyleaf, and Within Temptation in one sitting before. Special thanks to the songs "Injection" (Rise Against) and By Myself (Linkin Park).

Blood, Sweat, Tears

She feels her fangs elongate and they acheache_ache_ and she can feel the blood flooding her irises, turning them red, transforming her into a monster. She gasps and claws at her throat, and screams and screams and her face burns with tears and her throat just _burns. _A crash, and the door is open, Kaname is rushing in, and he sees her in all her bloodlust and she moves to hide her face. _He cannot see me like this...not...like this...._

He proffers a wrist but she suddenly cannot even think of drinking his blood.

"Yuuki! _Drink_!" He bites his own wrist and holds out and the smell of his blood overwhelms her. She waits for that undeniable pull, the call of pure blood. It doesn't come.

In it's place a wave of pure nausea sweeps over her. His blood, it smells so cloying, so much like power and death that she can't stomach it. And her cannot see her face.

Kaname takes a hold of her arms and pulls them from her face. She struggles, resisting, but he is far too strong and she feels that awful, awful fetid blood being brought to her lips.

"No!" The cry is nowhere near as forceful as she'd like; the nausea pounding in her head and her stomach weakens the exclamation to a whimper of protest. He tries to soothe her, speaking her name again and again and he forces his wrist between her lips and that taste...

She pulls away and can barely turn her head before the vomit comes to the surface. She falls to her hands and knees and red blood and bile spill from between her lips. And now she is thirstier. Her throat is on fire, so much _pain_.

_Pinky promise, if I lie, I'll drink a thousand needles, cross my heart and hope to die...._

When did she lie? Why does it feel like a thousand needles in her throat? More vomit comes up, the acid from her stomach burning her inflamed throat even further. Kaname is there, muttering, holding her hair back in vain—his blood and her vomit have already putrefied it. She forces him off of her, bites her own wrist in desperation. The blood doesn't nauseate her, but doesn't truly sate her. Kaname reaches for her but she runs from the room.

Alone in the bathroom she wipes her face and strips herself of the frilly dress and heels that Kaname insists on, forcing her bloodlust back down, and looks at herself. With savage movements, she chops her hair off at the chin, moving the scissors mercilessly. She drops the soiled locks to the floor and pulls on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt she doesn't quite remember. It is too large to be hers, too small and normal-looking to belong to Kaname, a gray hoodie that appears to be cut for a male. A scent, very faint, touches her nose and the bloodlust is back in full intensity. An image slams into her mind and she can see him. Deep, deep lavender eyes, hid behind silver hair that seems dark against his sallow-white skin.

"Z-Zero..." She gasps out his name and before she knows what is happening, she is running, her hands clawing at the door, ripping it open, hurtling down the stairs, past Hanabusa, past Kaname who calls out. She slams into the door to the outside and it bursts open even under her slight weight. _ZeroZeroZeroZeroZeroZero_.

She can feel rocks cutting her feet and branches whipping at her face and hands. She falls over a root and crashes into the dirt face-first. Yuuki sees him now, in front of her, walking away. "Zero!" She screams his name and runs after the phantom, tears streaming over her face. Her bloodlust is forgotten now, the rest of her body craving him so much that the cries of her vampire nature are overwhelmed, totally drowned out by the screaming of herself. She misses him so badly, and he's walking, always a few steps ahead of her. She knows now. Her human side, her vampire side, they are both her, and they want the same thing.

Zero.

She knows now. Her promise, her lie. It was to him, and herself. _I'll drink a thousand needles..._She loves him so much it's almost a physical ache.

And now she is near the town where Cross Academy, her home, is. And he lives nearby. She enters the town and his scent meets her nose. He is everywhere here. At that shop yesterday, that alley this morning. She follows his scent.

When she pounds on the door, her fangs are gone, her eyes dark chocolate, rimmed with red from crying. She is filthy, her hair sticking to her forehead with the sweat of running. The sweatshirt is stained with dirt form her fall. Her tears have turned the earth on her face to mud. It doesn't occur to her that it is nearly midnight. That he should be asleep.

When he opens the door, she falls inside, tears coming anew. At first all he can think is that this child, this little boy, is lost. Than he catches her scent and he knows.

This tiny figure is no boy, nor is it a child.

When he speaks her name, he almost feels as though he is sinning. "Yuuki...." He doesn't expect her to rocket towards him, crying into his chest, filthy and broken, bloodied hands clutching his shirt. The scent of her, all sweat and blood and tears, is so sweet to him, he revels in her embrace, even as she is sobbing with a sound like tearing cloth.

She cries into the cloth of his shirt, and her tears come all the harder after his arms come up around her and he buries his face in her hair. His scent is so...so Zero, she feels every emotion she has been hiding the memory of, and her whole body aches for his touch.

After a long, long while, of crying until eyes are stinging and dry and they are drunk with each others scent, he releases her. She cries out, but he silences her with reassurances that they should get her cleaned up, that it's okay.

He guides her to the bathroom, and she sits shivering on the edge of the tub and stares at the ground. Zero feels that their roles are now completely reversed—just as she did for him as a child, he starts the water for a bath, then turns to her.

"Yuuki?" he calls to her softly, but she just bites her lip. He sighs and begins to draw the sweatshirt over her head, the limp girl in front of him cooperating mutely. Dimly he notes that this sweatshirt is his, but as she stands there, in a bra and dirty jeans, he puts the thought aside and continues undressing her while she hangs like a marionette left alone in a play-puppet theater after all the lights are out and the other dolls put away. His fingers undo the button of the jeans and he unzips the pants carefully, sliding them down her hips. She steps out of them when he has brought them to her ankles, but otherwise remains motionless.

As he unhooks her bra, he reflects that this is not the first time he has seen her naked. Just as now, there was no room for modesty. She was burning with fever, and the Chairman wasn't home. He had stripped her down and put her in a cold bath to lower her temperature, which had been hovering around 103 Fahrenheit.

Completely undressed, Yuuki stands in Zero's bathroom feeling nothing but very very tired as he turns to turn off the hot water. When she doesn't step in herself, he pulls off his shirt and scoops her up, placing her in the water. Silently, he washes her hair, soaps the cuts on her hands and feet. Yuuki sits there immobile, neither blinking or flinching when the washcloth must run over her most private places.

When the water has faded to lukewarm, he picks her up again and places her on her own feet as he reaches for towels. One he wraps around her midriff, the other he uses to dry her arms and legs, her face, and then her hair. He drops the now soaking wet cloth in the laundry, and uses the third towel to dry himself, his torso and arms wet from bathing her.

He guides her into his room, and she sits on the bed like a puppet with it's strings cut. A pair of flannel PJ pants and a white cotton T-shirt later for both of them, and she is sitting cross-legged while he cleans each of her cuts with hydrogen peroxide, spreading them with tiny amounts of first-aid cream, and placing band-aids on the worst.

When that job is done, her hair is dry, a matted halo around her head. He combs it with gentle fingers, remembering how she used to yell when the Chairman pulled too hard, back when her father still did her hair with silly ribbons and bows every day.

Finally, all of his things to do have run out. Zero sinks onto his own bed, next to the limp form of Yuuki. Her eyes are almost closed, and she swaying. He is so tired himself, he pulls her close, tugs a blanket over the two of them, and feels himself falling into the darkness.

But sleep is the place where all the true thoughts, the un-noted, unacknowledged thoughts and feelings come to play. He smells her hair, clean now, and he remembers their first and last kiss. The pain of that thought causes him to bite his lip, hard. He can taste blood welling in the wound.

Yuuki can smell it. She stirs awake to the amazing, ambrosial smell of Zero's blood. The fangs are back, the red eyes. She lets out a tiny moan of desire and thirst, and he hears. He sees her eyes and her fangs and she doesn't avert them. But she does shake her head, push herself out of his embrace, and nick her own finger on a fang, drinking her own blood.

That scent brings Zero's ever-present, unquenchable thirst out. He has not let the facade slip yet, but in a second, all that is lost. She hears the increase in his breathing and looks to find him sitting up, panting, bent over and staring at her in the dark. She feels herself til er head to the side, offering him her blood. At the same time, he reaches for her shoulders, grasping them tightly.

"Zero...drink...." She offers her throat to him, and he bends to place his lips at her vein. Just before he bites, she feels his fangs scrape against her skin, and while she shivers with anticipation, he whispers, "Drink me."

She moans loudly as his fangs pierce her skin, the feeling then thousand times better as a vampire, a million times better than it ever was with Kaname. Her fangs pierce his own alabaster skin as she wonders idly if it would be the same for sex. And then she tastes his blood, and finally, _finally_, that awful fire is doused, and she knows that this man, this saintly, sin-stained man is her true beloved.

His hand makes it's way to the back of her head, clasping her at his throat, and she feels an amazing glowing spread from that hand to the tips of her toes, each fiber of her being tingling.

He can barely believe that after so long, he is drinking her blood again. And the feeling of her own fangs in his neck feel more amazing than he could ever have dreamed. _No wonder she was always so damn eager to give blood, if this is what being bitten feels like_....

When they are both sated, they lick each others wounds clean, and before they have thought properly, they kiss, able to taste their own blood in the others mouth.

When they wake the next morning, the lack of modesty is for another reason completely; rather than the result of necessity, they revel in their closeness, and Kaname come to the door after a night of tracking her, he is met by a girl glowing with love, wearing Zero's Pjs, and a silent male, both with bite wounds still healing at their throats.

xXx

Parting Comments: Well, I guess that pretty much covers it.

Yes, they did have sex.

I write this to confirm both that I think Yuuki and Kaname (gag) have had sex, and that Yuuki and Zero did have sex in this fic.

I actually didn't really mean to put the whole thing with the sex in, the bite scene was supposed to pretty much it, but those two being who and what they are, and this having been one of _the _most angsty fics I've ever written in under twelve hours, it just kinda slipped out. And, for those in doubt about the ending, let us not be stupid. Kaname would not just let Yuuki run out into the night without trying to find her. I just think it might have taken him a while, thus allowing for the sex.

Please leave reviews, and flamers are not welcome, contrary to popular belief.

Hugs and Kisses

Eden


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